August 29, 2022
On a ruined bridge high above the desolate Lands Between, Margit, the Fell Omen, stood between me and Stormveil Castle once again. The stakes were high: I’d spent £50 on a game months ago and a 20ft death-dealing guardian had seriously diverted my progress away from the main path. I had bounced off Dark Souls […]
June 12, 2019
Matthew Crawford’s book, The World Beyond Your Head, has some important lessons for maintaining clarity and sanity in a world of proliferating distractions. In meditation circles, it’s common knowledge that prolonged stability of attention can create the conditions for deep insights to arise. However, we live in societies where attention is being monetised and manipulated by […]
September 1, 2015
Our gadgets come out of the box ready to bombard us with emails, distract with SMS messages, snare us with headlines, and amuse us with status updates. In our technocratic culture, the expectation is that we are always ready to respond. Yet the pace of information grows ever more frantic. We could create a new default. […]
February 24, 2015
There’s a statistic doing the rounds that claims more than 50% of Earth’s species will be extinct within 85 years. E.O. Wilson, the Harvard professor behind this proclamation, has written about interdependence within ecosystems and the increasing pressure human activity is placing on life on Earth. The idea that more than half of our biodiversity – both species […]
January 27, 2015
“The stories people tell have a way of taking care of them. If stories come to you, care for them. And learn to give them away where they are needed. Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.” — Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams, quoted by Kevin Crossley-Holland in Urthona.